Stanford Study: X’s Algorithm Can Shift Political Opinions in Just Days

*Application period: July 7th to August 14th
“X’s algorithm” can change your political opinion in a few days–Stanford University in the US tests on over 1,000 people: innovative tech – itmedia news
Published on December 9th, 2024 at 8:00am [Yamashita Hiroki, itmedia]
The paper “Social media algorithms can shape affective polarization via exposure to antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” published by researchers from Stanford University and other institutions, is a research report that reveals that social media algorithms can change people’s political views in a few days. Leveraging large-scale language models (llm), the research team developed an approach to re-rank x feeds in real time for the impact of potentially politically polarizing content and studied the impact on users. The experiment was conducted over a 10-day period with the cooperation of 1,256 x users. They used a browser extension to control their feeds in real time, intentionally increasing or decreasing their exposure to hateful content posts. Participants were split into two experimental groups: one with reduced exposure to hostile content (727 participants) and one with increased exposure (529 participants). The first 3 days of the experiment were spent in normal feeding, followed by the intervention period of 7 days. The research team first developed a system to automatically identify hostile content. Using LLM, we detected eight elements – partisan hostility, support for undemocratic practices, support for partisan violence, support for undemocratic candidates, opposition to bipartisan cooperation, social distrust, social distance, and biased assessments of political facts – and classified posts containing four or more of these elements as hostile content. (Omitted)
*See source for full text.

Social Media Algorithms Can Shape Affective Polarization via Exposure to Antidemocratic Attitudes and Partisan Animosity

There is widespread concern about the negative impacts of social media feed ranking algorithms on political polarization...

arxiv.org

「Xのアルゴリズム」は数日であなたの政治的意見を変えられる――米スタンフォード大が1000人以上で検証

米スタンフォード大学などに所属する研究者らは、ソーシャルメディアのアルゴリズムが、数日で人々の政治的な見方を変えうることが明らかになった研究報告を発表した。

www.itmedia.co.jp